If you’ve watched U.S. trucking for the past 18 months, the hydrogen storyline reads like a slow-motion pileup. Nikola went bankrupt. Hyzon pulled back to refuse trucks and then started shopping itself around. And the Department of Energy began clawing back money from the green-hydrogen hubs that were supposed to anchor the whole ecosystem. Heavy Duty Trucking summed up the moment bluntly: U.S. momentum for fuel-cell trucks has largely stalled since Nikola and Hyzon left the field. Toyota’s still in. Daimler and Volvo are still in. But actual hydrogen trucks on actual American roads stay thin on the ground.
Meanwhile, about 7,000 miles away, a laundry-detergent company just went and did the thing American freight has spent half a decade arguing over. On June 4, 2026, Saudi Arabia’s Transport General Authority announced the rollout of the Kingdom’s first hydrogen-powered heavy-duty truck with autonomous driving built in, and one of the three names writing checks is Procter & Gamble. The Tide and Pampers people. The other two are Saudi distributor Ismail Abudawood and Chinese self-driving firm Hyperview. So while U.S. fleets keep debating whether hydrogen has a future, P&G’s Riyadh supply chain is already putting hydrogen freight on the road.
What P&G actually put on the road
The headline numbers are real, not slideware. Per the TGA, the truck runs on clean hydrogen, emits zero carbon at the tailpipe, refuels in minutes, and covers up to 1,500 kilometers on a fill. That’s roughly 930 miles between stops, comfortably past the 500-mile range Toyota quotes for its own hydrogen Class 8 in Southern California, and far enough to pull long-haul diesel routes into the conversation instead of leaving them in the “someday” bin.
The autonomy isn’t robotaxi-grade, either. The partners describe a multi-level self-driving stack running on advanced software and AI, aimed at squeezing more efficiency out of operations rather than removing the driver. Hyperview’s earlier truck with Aramco ran a Level 3 system that handled route planning, lane-keeping and obstacle detection, which is the realistic ceiling here: a human in the seat, the computer grinding out the highway miles. A version of this same truck family showed up at Riyadh’s Future Minerals Forum in January 2025 carrying a 240-kW fuel cell, 59 kilograms of usable hydrogen, and a 72-kWh battery, good for about 800 kilometers then. The June 2026 launch is that platform grown up, with longer legs and a name-brand multinational behind the freight.
Why P&G is the unlock, not the truck
Hydrogen trucking has never really had a vehicle problem. It’s had a buyer problem. Somebody has to commit to routes, volumes and fueling deals for long enough to justify the infrastructure spend, and that somebody has mostly been missing. Here, Saudi Arabia supplies the regulatory cover and the ministries, Abudawood is the in-country distributor that actually moves the cartons, and P&G is the anchor shipper whose consumer-goods volume makes the arithmetic close. Pull any one of the three and the truck is just a press photo.
That’s precisely the trio U.S. hydrogen has struggled to line up. Anheuser-Busch was an early Nikola pilot customer, but the American pattern has mostly been pilots that never graduate to fleets. Set that against what Toyota rolled out at ACT Expo in May 2026: a deal with Hyroad Energy, the outfit that scooped up 117 hydrogen Class 8 trucks at Nikola’s bankruptcy auction, to put 40 fuel-cell Class 8s on the road in Southern California. Forty trucks. After three decades of Toyota fuel-cell research, the flagship U.S. deployment is 40 trucks, and even that needed a bankruptcy fire sale to source the hardware.
The U.S. context that makes Riyadh look fast
Globally, the hydrogen-versus-battery fight is being settled on spreadsheets, not op-eds. BloombergNEF’s 2025 Factbook counted nearly 90,000 zero-emission trucks sold in the first half of 2025, already more than all of 2024, and 97% of them were battery-electric. Fuel-cell trucks made up roughly 1,000 units worldwide in that window, itself about half the prior year’s modest total. That’s less a debate than a verdict, and it’s why so much of the U.S. industry has quietly slid its hydrogen timelines to the right.
The American policy backdrop hasn’t helped. As Clean Trucking reported, the DOE canceled hundreds of clean-energy grants, including the funding behind California’s ARCHES hub and the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub in Washington. The same outlet noted Daimler pushing its liquid-hydrogen truck from a 2027 launch into the 2030s, blaming thin refueling infrastructure and choppy market conditions. So when Riyadh announces a 1,500-kilometer autonomous hydrogen heavy-hauler running for a consumer-products giant in 2026, it lands differently than one more American memorandum of understanding.
Why heavy logistics is hydrogen’s actual hiding spot
Here’s the part the U.S. argument keeps skating past: hydrogen was never going to win the pickup or the regional delivery van. Those belong to batteries, and that race is effectively over. Where fuel cells still have a coherent pitch is the exact duty cycle P&G’s Saudi route fits: long distances, heavy payloads, predictable origin-and-destination pairs, and a single fleet customer with enough volume to justify a refueling point or two instead of a whole national grid.
That’s the same reasoning Daimler Truck, Volvo and Toyota leaned on when they signed onto the Cellcentric venture earlier this year — batteries for the short hauls, fuel cells for the long, heavy runs where range and refueling speed actually matter. Saudi geography happens to be a near-ideal test bed for that thesis: long, flat, hot corridors between industrial hubs, plus a national hydrogen build-out tied to Vision 2030. California has the regulation but not the cheap hydrogen. The Kingdom has the cheap hydrogen and a transport authority willing to herd the ministries into line. That same logic is quietly pushing hydrogen into other corners batteries can’t reach, including vertical flight for medical logistics.
The autonomy angle nobody’s pricing in
The self-driving piece matters more than it reads on first pass. A hydrogen Class 8 with a human driver is competing against a diesel Class 8 with a human driver, and outside a regulated zero-emission zone the diesel wins on cost almost every time. A hydrogen Class 8 with Level 3-plus autonomy starts pulling the single biggest line item in heavy trucking, labor, out of the equation, which is the only realistic route to total-cost-of-ownership parity that doesn’t lean on permanent subsidies.
Stack that on top of Hyperview’s factory plans, a hydrogen-truck plant at the King Salman Automotive Complex backed by the Public Investment Fund and slated to build 1,000 trucks a year with 60% earmarked for export, and you can see why a multinational like P&G is paying attention. This isn’t a one-off ESG photo op. It’s a supply-side bet that the Gulf turns into a hydrogen heavy-truck exporter before North American volumes recover.
U.S. fleets aren’t wrong to be cautious. The economics, the infrastructure gap and the bankruptcies are all real. But while the domestic conversation is still stuck on whether hydrogen has a future, P&G’s Riyadh route has quietly turned that question into a logistics problem with a vendor, a range figure and a delivery schedule. The first commercial autonomous hydrogen heavy truck on a working freight contract isn’t running between Los Angeles and Phoenix. It’s hauling for a detergent company in Saudi Arabia.
